Make the McKenzie Connection!

Buster Keaton made Cottage Grove a mini-Hollywood

Continued From Last Week

The climactic scene is the main thing people talk about in South Lane County when this movie comes up. It was literally a train wreck, although metaphorically, it was anything but.

Buster wanted the movie's climax to involve a locomotive falling through a burning bridge into a river. With this in mind, although he borrowed the two main lakes from local logging shows, he purchased the third outright. He had plans for that third locomotive that probably would not be approved by its owner unless that owner was him.

Buster found a suitable scenery — a spot in the Row River (pronounced to rhyme with “cow”; it’s a reference to fistfights, not skiffs) 15 miles east of town, near the hamlet of Culp Creek. At this spot, the river ran through a ravine that looked, in film, bigger than it was. He had his crew build a short railroad track leading up to a 215-foot trestle bridge across it at that spot — which his crew also built from scratch. The bridge was surprisingly sturdy looking, considering it was designed to fail, but it had to fail at just the right moment. To ensure it did, they fixed dynamite charges to it in a few key spots.

The big day was scheduled for July 23, and the Cottage Grove City Council declared a holiday so that everyone could come to watch. Row River Road and Brice Creek Road were lined with 600 automobiles, and two special excursion trains brought more. It was the event of the season.

Rumor has it Buster was planning to ride the locomotive down into the river, but his wife nixed the plan. It’s probably not true, but it would have been perfectly in character for Buster! Instead, he had a paper-mache dummy made, dressed in an engineer’s uniform, and tied it into place.

Buster carefully set up six different cameras. He did several trial runs just to make sure everything was jake—a derailment at speed just short of the bridge on his hastily built track would be disastrous. Luckily, everything was holding up great.

Then it was show time!

A crew member climbed aboard the Texas, adjusted the paper-mache “engineer,” and opened up the throttle. Then he hopped down and watched it chuffing away, building speed, heading for the bridge.

Smoke was billowing from the fires the crew had built on the bridge by this time; in the movie, Buster lights it on fire to delay the pursuing Union soldiers in their locomotive, but the Union officer orders it to hurry on: “The bridge is not burned enough to stop you,” he says (in a title card; remember, this is a silent film), “and my men will ford the river.”

The shot — well, you know how well it went; by now, surely you’ve seen it. You can see the puffs of smoke from the dynamite, but only if you know what you want. The engine crashes down, and the fire quenches in the river (which had been dammed up to make it look more fearsome; the upper row is more or less a large creek, especially in mid-summer).

By the way, the wrecked locomotive and tender were left in the riverbed until the outbreak of the Second World War, at which point they were salvaged for scrap metal to be turned into Sherman tanks and such. It’s now gone, but Lloyd Williams of the Cottage Grove Historical Society told reporter Meghan Kalkstein in 2007 that bits of track and steel can still be seen in the river when the water level is low.

After the train wreck scene, the ruined bridge was the location for battle scenes for the next couple of days. The dammed-up river turned out to be deeper than expected, and a few actors nearly drowned in it.

At the end of the summer, the town held a farewell picnic in the park for the film cast and crew. Everyone had a good time, even those who had been injured in falls, explosions, and other incidents on the set.

The movie had its Oregon premiere in Portland on New Year’s Eve, and it came to Cottage Grove a month later. The locals, of course, loved it; the rest of the world, not so much. Buster Keaton is a moviemaking legend for a reason, and he had noticed the public taste trending away from slapstick and toward more dramatic comedic fare.

He had not noticed that when the public went to a Buster Keaton film, they were not expecting dramatic fare; they were expecting slapstick, of which he was probably history’s best practitioner. So when audiences left the theater after watching The General, it was as if they’d gone to a Three Stooges show and found Curly, Larry, and Moe unironically performing Hamlet. Their disappointment blinded them to the sheer excellence of the film; reviews were mediocre or bad, and sales were underwhelming.

Sales were worse than underwhelming. The film cost $750,000 ($13 million in modern currency), including $42,000 for the train-wreck scene alone. Of course, that’s a tiny fraction of what it costs to make a box office bomb today. For example, John Carter (of Mars), Disney’s legendary 2012 box-office disaster that starred a Confederate military man, cost $264 million to shoot.

But the industry was very different in the silent era, and The General’s budget, skimpy as it seems to modern eyes, was orders of magnitude bigger than the average budget of a silent-era feature film.

And like John Carter, sales came nowhere close to covering its costs. Records are incomplete, but the consensus is that box office receipts came in just south of $500,000, so the film grossed a loss of 34 percent, plus marketing expenses and such. It pretty much ended Buster Keaton’s career as an independent filmmaker, although he continued to be a sought-after actor.

(John Carter, by the way, did lots worse. It lost roughly 100 percent of its budget and is usually number one on Internet lists with titles like “biggest box-office bombs of all time.” This is ironic because, like The General, it’s a really good movie.)

But a few years after The General was released, the movie industry had changed enough for critics and viewers to realize it was brilliant. Orson Welles said it was “the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made.” Twenty or 30 years later, cinema buffs were still raving about it.

And its star has risen steadily since; film writer Tim Dirks introduces it as “an imaginative masterpiece of dead-pan ‘Stone-Face’ Buster Keaton comedy, generally regarded as one of the greatest of all silent comedies (and Keaton's favorite) — and undoubtedly the best train film ever made.” It’s ranked in 18th place on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American films of all time. (I and the other eight or nine die-hard John Carter fans can only dream of such a turnaround; but anything can happen, right?)

Buster himself never lost faith. “I was more proud of that picture than any picture I ever made,” he said in a 1963 interview.

And, despite stiff competition from other movies made in the town over the years — including Stand By Me and Animal House — so is Cottage Grove.

(Sources: “The General (film),” an article by Jim Scheppke published Aug. 22, 2022, in The Oregon Encyclopedia; “Buster Keaton’s Last Stand,” an article by Julian Smith published Aug. 5, 2020, in Alta Journal; “Remains of the General,” a TV package reported by Meghan Kalkstein and aired on KVAL-TV on May 23, 2007.)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, was published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic, contact him at [email protected] or 541-357-2222.

 

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